What Is SEO & Why Should You Care?

What is SEO and how will it help my business?

In its simplest form, search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of optimizing your website to attract more traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search engines have a set of criteria called an algorithm that they use to determine which websites deserve to be on the 1st page of their search results for a given search term, or keyword. The goal of SEO for business, then, is to make your business’s website fit a search engine’s algorithm better than your competitors’ websites. That way, you’ll rank higher on the 1st page of Google for the specific terms your customers are searching for.

Even though SEO can technically be performed for any search engine, Your SEO Sucks will focus on SEO for Google. This is because Google controls about 70% of the search engine marketplace. In fact, it’s become so popular that Google is officially in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a verb.

Now, you might be wondering, “How does Google catalog and rank all the websites in the world?”

The answer is that they have automated programs (otherwise known as “spiders” or “bots”) that crawl millions of webpages on a daily basis. These bots effectively maintain an accurate, up-to-date database of the entire Internet.

How Will Effective SEO Improve My Business?

Alright, alright, we know what SEO is, but how will it help your business? How will being at the top of Google lead to more customers or clients?

Let me answer that question with another: what if you had an automated salesperson that sent qualified leads to your business 24/7?

That’s what SEO can do for your business.

Remember how people used to flip open their Yellow Pages phonebook whenever they needed to find a business or service provider?

Well, Google is the new Yellow Pages, only it’s more interactive and user-friendly. Plus, it’s evolving to keep up with the needs of today’s customers. Your customers.

Just in case you’re not convinced, here are some hard stats that demonstrate why SEO is important:

Whether you’re using Google AdWords (discussed below) or doing conventional SEO, the important part is that you’re at the top of Google. If you can’t be found in Google, you might as well not have a business!

What’s really interesting is how much traffic goes to the first three spots in Google. Look at the heatmap below to see why the top 3 spots are the most important:

In the image, the dark red indicates areas with an extremely high number of clicks, while the thick red line across the middle of the heatmap indicates the cutoff for “above the fold”.

Above the fold refers to the part of a page that people can see without scrolling down.

As you can see, only the first 3 to 5 results in the above image are visible without scrolling down. That’s why ranking in the top 3 results is so much better than ranking in spots 4 through 10, even though they’re all still on the first page. Statistically, the first result gets a whopping 20% of the traffic.